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Government has “no strategy” for increasing social care need

Government has “no strategy” for increasing social care need
9 November 2015



The government appears to now have “no strategy whatever to tackle the rising and pressing needs for social care,” a leading think-tank has said in a statement.

The Commission on the Future of Health and Social Care in England (led by Dame Kate Barker CBE and also known as the Barker Commission) was created in 2014 as an independent body by The King’s Fund because of “the mounting evidence that both health and social care were heading towards a crisis”.

The government appears to now have “no strategy whatever to tackle the rising and pressing needs for social care,” a leading think-tank has said in a statement.

The Commission on the Future of Health and Social Care in England (led by Dame Kate Barker CBE and also known as the Barker Commission) was created in 2014 as an independent body by The King’s Fund because of “the mounting evidence that both health and social care were heading towards a crisis”.

It called for the government to introduce a much simpler pathway for individuals and their carers through the “maze of health and social care”, and commit to spend between 11 and 12% of GDP on health and social care combined by 2025.

The think-tank’s statement, released yesterday, read: “We write now out of a deep concern at the many signs that – far from social care and its funding being simplified and improved, as we recommended – the care system is instead crumbling around us. That in turn is piling more pressure onto a National Health Service that is struggling both financially and in terms of performance.”

“The government appears now to have no strategy whatever to tackle the rising and pressing needs for social care.”

The Commission also calls on the government to adopt other measures that they recommended last year, such as providing – as a first step towards a simpler pathway – free social care to those whose needs are defined as ‘critical’.

It continued: “We would stress – as we did in our final report – that the costs of health and social care will not go away. The question is not whether most of this money is spent. It is about where the costs, human as well as financial, fall – on collective provision through public expenditure, or on those individuals and families who are unlucky enough to have high, or very high, care needs.”

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